German fear

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The complementary stereotypes German Angst ( English , for example: "typically German hesitation") and German assertiveness (for example: "typically German arrogance") are used as characteristically felt, social and political, collective behavior of Germans .

origin

The term fear , which has become naturalized in the English language like Weltschmerz ( Germanism ), describes either a generalized anxiety disorder , an unfounded diffuse fear, or an ostentatiously presented “suffering in the world”. The noun “fear”, which is restricted to the German and Dutch-speaking areas, was introduced into the philosophical discussion by Søren Kierkegaard in 1844 , so it is only “typically German” via the etymological root. Via Kierkegaard, the term found its way into existentialism to Martin Heidegger , Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Jaspers . From there it was also adopted in the description vocabulary for works of art. Today the term "fear" can be used in a rather unspecific and often ironic way for something scary in popular culture .

Assertiveness means "assertiveness, self-confidence, determination".

Examples of the stereotypes

German fear

The following examples can be cited for the German fear stereotype : Germany's reluctant foreign and security policy after reunification , especially with regard to the second Gulf War . Likewise, the recurring, intensive reaction to events in the German media was an example of “German fear”. Popular occasions for this could include the refugee crisis in Germany from 2015 , Google Street View (the expansion of which was the only country to be discontinued in Germany), the H5N1 bird flu , BSE , the risks of nuclear power plants and the rampant fear of the end of the world or the apocalypse caused by the Climate change or the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake .
In connection with the financial and economic crisis that occurred in 2007 , Ulrich Greiner stated in May 2009 that nothing special was to be noted about “German angst” and German “hysterical phenomena” in contrast to neighboring countries such as England and France . It looks like "as if the Germans have to revise their image of themselves". As an explanation, Greiner offers the observation that "the masses as a creepy animal, as a politically explosive power, [...] if not disappeared, at least have been weakened by the general process of individualization".
From the point of view of others, German Angst does not refer to the intensity of the reaction, but to issues, namely concerns and caution in safety and environmental issues.

German assertiveness

The following examples can be cited for the stereotype German assertiveness : In its German version, European nationalism offers examples of arrogance that have become historical and are addressed to other nations and that had a considerable, long-lasting effect. These are the verses from the poem “Germany's Profession” (1861/1871) by Emanuel Geibel : “ And it may be with the German being / Once the world has recovered .” Wilhelm II added it to the end of a speech on December 31. August 1907 at a feast for the province of Westphalia , always with the goal of "German world position and international standing" in mind.

Reception in science and literature

Fear as a characteristic of Germans in literary representation

The American German-born writer Thomas Wolfe visited Germany again in 1936, from which the penultimate and important parts of the final chapter are designed in his novel There is no way back , published posthumously in 1940 . In Germany, Wolfe first experienced being famous at the age of 36, as his novel Schau heimwärts, Engel had made him known to a wider audience. The narrator of his novel, George Webber, is quite surprised and affected by the number of people who put him in their confidence around the jubilee event of the Summer Olympics in Berlin and how they give him back their moods:

“He realized that this whole nation was infected with the plague of constant fear: a creeping paralysis, as it were, that distorted and ruined all human relationships. The pressure of an uninterrupted, shameful compulsion had silenced this whole people in fearful, malicious secrecy, until they had passed through self-poisoning into a mental decay from which they could not be cured or freed. […] During those summer weeks and months George noticed the decomposition and shipwreck of a great spirit all around. The poisonous emanations of oppression, persecution and fear polluted the air like contagious miasms and polluted, contaminated and destroyed the lives of all people George knew. "

- Thomas Wolfe : There is no going back

In his novel Kaputt , published in 1944, Curzio Malaparte also paints a picture of fearful Germans, but now of soldiers, against the background of a war experience that saw the planned " Blitzkrieg " fail in the East , so that the soldiers did not feel that way expected total war of annihilation developed:

“The officers looked at the soldiers and the rifles thrown on the ground and said nothing. Now the Blitzkrieg was over, now the 'Thirty Years Blitzkrieg' began; the war won was over, now the war lost began. And I watched how the white patch of fear was born in the depths of the extinguished eyes of the German officers and soldiers, I saw how it gradually grew, spread, ate the pupil, burned the roots of the eyelashes and the eyelashes fell one by one like the long yellow eyelashes of sunflowers. When the German begins to be afraid, when the mysterious German fear creeps into his bones, only then does he arouse horror and compassion. [...] And just then the German becomes dangerous. "

- Curzio Malaparte : Broken

Fear in the "European Civil War 1914-1945"

The First World War was to the American historian Arno J. Mayer result of a general crisis that the whole of Europe in a " decadence " - and " fin de siècle had seized" mood. The old elites of the ancien régime , still ruling Europe-wide , saw themselves threatened in their privileged position by "the pace of capitalist development, the revolutionary sentiment of the proletariat, the vulnerability of the state apparatus of order and the tendency of the industrial and educated bourgeoisie to become independent". The resulting “great fear” then led the rulers “to the idea of ​​a preventive, 'cleansing' war”.

The political scientist Enzo Traverso dedicates his 2007 book “A feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 “a chapter describing fear, whose roots for the climate in the interwar years he sees as being primarily in the experience of the First World War. It finds its expression in works by Erich Maria Remarque ( Nothing New in the West ), Ernst Jünger ( In Stahlgewittern ) or Louis-Ferdinand Céline ( Journey to the End of the Night ). This fear was then used by fascism for its own purposes:

“Fascism grafted the myth of the Bolshevik threat onto the unrest and insecurity that had spread in European societies after the“ Great War ”. He transformed fear - which psychoanalysis describes as a feeling of fear incapable of finding a goal - into fear of a specific enemy: communism and revolution. "

- Traverso

Fascism then glorified an image of men who banished fear in outsider figures who were considered feminine, hysterical, Jewish, and generally degenerate.

Fear and Politics with Franz Neumann

While Malaparte's generalized foreign stereotype suggests traits of an enemy image - which he is not aiming for because he only assumes German soldiers in a certain situation - Th. Wolfe adds an analysis of American sentiments to his descriptions of the fearful behavior of Germans:

“In a foreign country, under these deeply moving, worrying and disgusting circumstances, it became clear to me for the first time how badly America was going; I also realized that it was suffering from a similar disease to Germany and that this disease ruled the whole world as a terrible mental plague. "

- Wolfe

In an essay “Fear and Politics” published in 1954, the German-American political scientist Franz Neumann (1900–1954) assumes the four freedoms that Franklin D. Roosevelt made on January 6, 1941: freedom of expression, freedom of religion, economic freedom Security and Freedom from Fear, freedom from fear. Neumann's thesis at the time of the Cold War is that the end of the Second World War “did not make fear disappear from the world. On the contrary, it has grown even bigger and is starting to paralyze nations and make people incapable of making free decisions. ”While in terror, propaganda, in crimes committed together and in identifying leaders, he defines the methods with fear political is institutionalized, he does not see Germany as endangered, "because the historical experience, despite all attempts to suppress the memory of National Socialism , has a very strong impact". With a concept like “German fear” it is advisable to be extremely careful because, as Neumann explains, a phenomenon such as fear that can be observed in all modern mass societies cannot be reduced to a purely German disposition.

criticism

Survey results at the beginning of the 2019/2020 coronavirus epidemic contradict the stereotype German fear

There are three surveys during the 2019/2020 coronavirus epidemic that show that German citizens reacted quite calmly in February and March 2020 compared to other European countries, which contradicts the “German fear” stereotype. Of the largest European nations, only the British reacted more calmly. These results are indicated by a study for which the polling institute Ipsos surveyed 10,000 people in ten countries on February 28 and 29. Correspondingly, draconian quarantine measures for entire villages or cities are disproportionately often rejected by the Germans.

After the coronavirus continued to spread in Germany at the beginning of March, a survey by the ARD Germany trend confirmed these results and pointed in the same direction. A representative survey of 1002 German citizens, carried out by Infratest dimap on March 2nd and 3rd, 2020 showed that only six percent of Germans were very afraid of being infected; 16 percent were very afraid; In contrast, 76 percent of those questioned were little or hardly afraid. At the ZDF Politbarometer on Friday, March 6, 2020, comparable representative results were presented after the Elections Research Group questioned 1,276 people. A majority of Germans are not worried about the threat to their own health in view of the spread of the coronavirus. In an international comparison, Germany is calm here. Trust in the community is also quite high.

See also

literature

  • Sabine Bode: The German disease - German fear. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-608-94425-7 .
  • Friedrich Ani: German fear. Novel. Droemer Knaur, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-426-19543-7 .
  • Bernhard Frevel: Who's Afraid of the Bad Man? A study book about security and the feeling of security. Nomos-Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1998, ISBN 3-7890-5670-7 .
  • Søren Kierkegaard: The term fear. Trans. V. Gisela Perlet. Reclam, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-15-008792-9 .
  • Curzio Malaparte: Broken. Novel. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-17412-6 .
  • Franz Neumann: Fear and Politics. In: Franz Neumann: Democratic and authoritarian state. Political Theory Studies. Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt 1967, pp. 261–291.
  • Enzo Traverso: A feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945. Stock, Paris 2007.
    • Under the spell of violence. The European civil war. 1914-1945. Siedler, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-88680-885-4 .
  • Thomas Wolfe: There is no going back. Novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1981, ISBN 3-499-14753-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Walter Schulz : The problem of fear in modern philosophy, in: Aspects of fear, ed. von Hoimar von Ditfurth , Munich 1972, pp. 13-27.
  2. ↑ Reinhard Zöllner, Japan , Fukushima , and we, celebrants of a nuclear earthquake disaster. Iudicium, Munich 2011, pp. 144–155.
  3. ↑ Ulrich Greiner, What has become of German fear? In the middle of the economic crisis, Germans are no more upset than citizens of other nations. They have lost their lust for the apocalypse . In: Die Zeit from May 14, 2009, p. 25.
  4. ↑ See Winged Words. Quotations, sentences and concepts in their historical context, ed. by Kurt Böttcher et al. Leipzig 1985, p. 501 f.
  5. ↑ Speeches of the Emperor. Addresses, sermons and toasts of Wilhelm II, ed. by Ernst Johann, Munich 1966, pp. 120–122. On the net: http://www.westfaelische-geschichte.de/que1271
  6. ↑ Thomas Wolfe: There is no going back. Hamburg 1953, pp. 533, 535.
  7. ^ Curzio Malaparte: Broken. Frankfurt a. M. 2007, p. 268 f.
  8. ^ Arno J. Mayer: Noble power and bourgeoisie. The crisis in European society 1848-1914 , Munich 1984, p. 300 f.
  9. ^ Enzo Traverso: A feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 . Paris (Stock) 2007. - German: Under the spell of violence. The European Civil War 1914–1945 . Siedler: München 2008, ISBN 3-88680-885-8 , p. 212.
  10. ^ Enzo Traverso: A feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 . Paris (Stock) 2007. - German: Under the spell of violence. The European Civil War 1914–1945 . Siedler: München 2008, ISBN 3-88680-885-8 , p. 227.
  11. ^ Enzo Traverso: A feu et à sang. De la guerre civile européenne 1914–1945 . Paris (Stock) 2007. - German: Under the spell of violence. The European Civil War 1914–1945 . Siedler: München 2008, ISBN 3-88680-885-8 , p. 225.
  12. ↑ Thomas Wolfe: There is no going back . Reinbek near Hamburg 1995, p. 614
  13. ^ Franz Neumann: Fear and Politics . In: Franz Neumann: Democratic and authoritarian state. Political Theory Studies . Frankfurt a. M. 1967, p. 261.
  14. ^ Franz Neumann: Fear and Politics . In: Franz Neumann: Democratic and authoritarian state. Political Theory Studies . Frankfurt a. M. 1967, p. 284.
  15. ↑ a b c WORLD: Because of "German fear" - the Germans are extremely cool in the Corona crisis . March 6, 2020. Online at www.welt.de. Retrieved March 12, 2020.
  16. ^ NTV: No German fear. Survey: The majority of Germans do not see themselves at risk from the coronavirus . March 6, 2020. Online at www.n-tv.de. Retrieved March 12, 2020.